Quotes from Al Ries

The easy way to get into a person's mind is to be first.

The primary objective of a branding program is never the market for the product or service. The primary objective of a branding program is always the mind of the prospect. The mind comes first; the market follows where the mind leads.

What should a brand leader advertise? Brand leadership, of course. Leadership is the single most important motivating factor in consumer behavior.

Good things happen when you narrow your focus.

Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Parker, made a deliberate attempt to restrict the number of appearances and records the King made. As a result, every time Elvis appeared, it was an event of enormous impact. (Elvis himself contributed to this strategy by overdosing early and severely dampening his future appearances. Likewise Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.)

To find a unique position, you must ignore conventional logic. Conventional logic says you find your concept inside yourself or inside the product. Not true. What you must do is look inside the prospect's mind.

Building your brand on quality is like building your house on sand. You can build quality into your product, but that has little to do with your success in the marketplace.

Quality is a nice thing to have, but brands are not built by quality alone.

The average person can tolerate being told something which he or she knows nothing about. (Which is why news is an effective advertising approach.) But the average person cannot tolerate being told he or she is wrong. Mind-­changing is the road to advertising disaster.

Most marketing mistakes stem from the assumption that you're fighting a product battle rooted in reality.

With a plethora of products in every category, how does a company use advertising to blast its way into the mind? The basic underlying marketing strategy has got to be "reposition the competition." Because there are so few creneaus to fill, a company must create one by repositioning the competitors that occupy the positions in the mind. In other words, to move a new idea or product into the mind, you must first move an old one out.

Today brands are born, not made. A new brand must be capable of generating favorable publicity in the media or it won't have a chance in the marketplace. And just how do you generate publicity? The best way to generate publicity is by being first. In other words, by being the first brand in a new category.

The most difficult part of positioning is selecting that one specific concept to hang your hat on. Yet you must, if you want to cut through the prospect's wall of indifference.

Traditional marketing is not focused on creating new categories. Traditional marketing is focused on creating new customers. Traditional marketing involves finding out what consumers want and then giving them what they want, better and cheaper than the competition.

In politics," said John Lindsay, "the perception is the reality." So, too, in advertising, in business, and in life.

Positioning defined Positioning starts with a product. A piece of merchandise, a service, a company, an institution, or even a person. Perhaps yourself. But positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect. That is, you position the product in the mind of the prospect.

In our overcommunicated society, the paradox is that nothing is more important than communication.

To be successful today, you must touch base with reality. And the only reality that counts is what's already in the prospect's mind. To be creative, to create something that doesn't already exist in the mind, is becoming more and more difficult. If not impossible. The basic approach of positioning is not to create something new and different, but to manipulate what's already up there in the mind, to retie the connections that already exist.

In the communication jungle out there, the only hope to score big is to be selective, to concentrate on narrow targets, to practice segmentation. In a word, positioning.

the professionals who are opposed to advertising say it downgrades their profession. And it does. To advertise effectively today, you have to get off your pedestal and put your ear to the ground. You have to get on the same wavelength as the prospect. In advertising, dignity as well as pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.

Take facsimile, for example. Over the past two decades, the facsimile has become an indispensable part of every company's communication portfolio. Americans will send 65 billion pages of faxes this year, more than 230 per person. And 50 percent of all international telephone calls are now fax calls.

Never run advertising until the major publicity possibilities have been exploited.

Don't try to trick the prospect. Advertising is not a debate. It's a seduction. The

Advertising can only maintain brands that have been created by publicity.